Foresight Update 31

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Inside
Foresight

We have received two challenge-requests; one
for your time, the other for your money:

$45K Challenge Grant Needs Matching
Donations by January 31

One of our Senior Associates has stepped up to the plate again
this year with a two-for-one $45,000
challenge grant to Foresight. This offer was originally set
to expire on December 31, but because members will be hearing
about it quite late, we have been able to negotiate an extension
to the end of January.

This means that for every new dollar pledged by January 31,
Foresight will receive two more, thereby tripling your donation.

Qualifying as matching funds are: new Senior Associate
memberships, upgraded memberships, and lump sums of cash or
publicly-traded stock in any amount. Giving appreciated stock can
result in a greater tax benefit to the donor; Foresight has an
account set up to enable direct transfers of stock.

User testing needed now on
CritSuite software

Anyone with access to the World Wide Web can help by testing
the CritSuite software. Just go to crit.org
and start using it. CritSuite includes the three programs:
CritLink, CritMap, and CritMail. The first and third should work
with any browser; CritMap currently requires Netscape 4 or
Internet Explorer 3.

The most exciting test to do is view your own pages through
CritLink and especially CritMap. Remember that these only know
about pages that have been visited through crit.org at least
once, so to get a CritMap view of pages that point to your page,
visit the pages that point to it. You can find these through the
"Ask AltaVista for backlinks to this page" button at
the bottom of your page as viewed though CritLink. Then briefly
visit each one that CritMap doesn't yet display.

Keeping firmly in mind that the software you are testing is at
the alpha or beta stage, please send commentsboth
compliments and bug reportsto comments@crit.org.

"Pioneers of Hypertext"
praise new Web tools

We've already seen some initial positive reaction to the
CritSuite work:

"The Crit toolset is another good step in Web evolution
toward the complete feature set needed to truly revolutionize how
we collectively develop and apply knowledgein business and
throughout society," said Doug Engelbart,
a pioneer of hypertext as well as inventor of the computer mouse
and graphical user interface.

Commenting from Japan, Ted Nelson, the
visionary hypertext pioneer whose work inspired the Crit team,
said, "At last we can annotate the Web, and high time."

Early reaction from the press is encouraging. Matt McKenzie,
writing for the Seybold Report on Internet Publishing,
clearly "gets" and likes the idea:

"CritSuite is an intriguing concept, offering a
two-way exchange of information by linking comments and
questions directly to a Web page, rather than by using
separate discussion groups or chat areas. At this point,
however, the system is better suited to controlled
environments, such as intranets, than it is to the open
Internet. Currently, multiple annotations to the same phrase
or text segment result in multiple brackets; as a result,
it's easy to see how annotations to controversial or popular
pages could quickly become unmanageable. According to
Foresight executive director Chris Peterson, CritSuite's
developers are working on filtering options that will display
annotations based on authorship, link type, popularity or
other user-defined criteria. Peterson also said that
Foresight expects third-party developers to modify the
software (the source code is freely available at the
Foresight Web site) to use various filtering
schemes...Peterson said that Foresight is considering a
partnership with a search engine to crawl the Web and
deliberately index backlinksa move that would speed up
the processalthough the institute hasn't yet worked out
such a deal.

Foresight is known mostly for its vocal (and sometimes
controversial) advocacy of nanotechnology projects. Given
this background, Web page annotation tools may seem like a
conceptual stretch, but Peterson says that the Institute's
work in this area reflects a need for tools to aid
discussions of complex policy and technology issues. And, in
fact, it's easy to see how a set of tools like CritSuite
could make discussions both more open and more valuable. The
annotations provide a way not only to link comments to a
document, but also to understand the context of a comment or
questiona trait frequently missing in other discussion
forums, where the document that sparked the discussion may
not even be available to the participants. CritLink's
backlink mapping also provides a useful way for readers and
authors to understand who is linking to a given page, placing
a document within the larger context of the Web.

For now, CritSuite is an intriguing set of tools that
still has a long way to go before it's ready to live up to
its promise. We suspect, however, that by placing the source
code on the Web for free download, Foresight is seeding a
community of developers who may take the software in some
surprisingand potentially
valuabledirections."

It's heartening to see Foresight's work on Web Enhancement
being understood and appreciated at such an early stage. Soon, we
hope to put these tools to the use for which they were designed:
critical discussion of important issues in technology. We hope
you'll join in.

Foresight
Unveils Backlink MediatorTo Provide "Other
Half of the Web"

Before a late evening and enthusiastic crowd of several
hundred media and technophiles, Foresight Institute unveiled its
major contribution to more informed discussion of serious
issuesa "backlink mediator" and related Web tools
that allow readers of a Web document to "mark up"
others' Web documents to agree, disagree, ask questions, or make
a general comment. Readers can see, on one screen, who has linked
to a given Web page, and whether they agree or disagree.

CritLink, which allows readers to add their
own comment links anywhere in the text of any Web page. Created
by Ka-Ping Yee, CritLink
is the first means on the Web for people to make comments about
articles posted on the Web that appear directly within the
original article. Ping is an undergraduate student in Computer
Engineering at the University of Waterloo in Canada.

CritMap, which will display all of a Web
document's linksboth links made from the document by the
original author and links made to the document by othersin
a graphical display. Terry
Stanley, a software engineer, wrote the code for this portion
of the CritSuite tools.

CritMail, a new version of Hypermail
which converts e-mail archives into Web documents. Intended for
use with CritLink, it allows readers to see a quote as its author
meant it to appearin context. Its uses include the ability
to migrate existing e-mail-based Usenet or Listserv discussions
to HTML, so that an issues discussion can be carried on within. Peter McCluskey created CritMail.

The heart of the new tool set is CritLink.
When a reader views any site through the window of a CritLink
server, any word, phrase, or text block may be highlighted by
diamond brackets of different colors that signify agreement,
comment, disagreement, or a query. Clicking on the highlighted
phrase allows a reader to view the full comment, which of course
may itself contain many links to other comments.

As discussion becomes more complex through a CritSuite server,
Stanley's CritMap
comes into play, providing graceful curving line links between
any page of HTML and all other pages that have coarse-grained
(link to page) or fine-grained (link to specific phrase)
hypertext links to it. CritMap allows the viewer to select any of
the linked pages and then view all the pages with which it is
linked.

The introductory event was hosted by Ed
Niehaus, President of Niehaus Ryan Group, Inc., a leading
Internet-focused public relations firm, whose clients recently
have expanded to include Apple Computer. "This is one of the
most exciting things ever to come down the Internet
Highway," Ed told the audience. "CritSuite fills in the
missing portion of the World Wide Web that was envisioned by the
original creators of hypertext, but never before
implemented."

"The beauty of this approach is that all the tools of
CritSuite are available through any conventional Web browser.
People thought for a long time that it wouldn't be possible to
create back-linking on the World Wide Web without completely
overhauling the Web's basic structure. Foresight Institute's
brilliant team of software engineers has proven otherwise."

Crit Team: Foresight's dynamic team that created
the CritSuite Web Enhancement
tools include softwear engineer Terry Stanley and
undergraduate student Ka-Ping
Yee (front, left and right) and Peter McCluskey and Mark Miller,
(rear, left and right). Terry created CritMap; Ping created
CritLink; Peter created CritMail; Mark did the early
architecture of CritLink and provides design advice and moral
support for the ongoing CritSuite effort.

Feynman
Prizes Awarded

At each of its Conferences, Foresight Institute identifies and
recognizes outstanding researchers in the field of molecular
nanotechnology. As the field has progressed, the terms of the
prize have evolved. This year, for the first time, separate
prizes were awarded for experimental and theoretical work.
Winners were selected on the basis of being judged the best
thesis or refereed paper at the 1997 Conference.

The prize for experimental work was won by a team centered at
IBM Research Division Zurich Research Laboratory, for work using
scanning probe microscopes to manipulate molecules. The prize for
theoretical work was won by a team at NASA Ames Research Center
for work in computational nanotechnology. Each team received a
$5,000 cash award to be divided among its members, as well as
certificates of recognition for all awardees.

The researchers awarded the 1997 Feynman Prize in
Nanotechnology for Experimental Work were James Gimzewski and
Reto Schlittler of IBM and Christian Joachim of CEMES-CNRS
(France).

Previous winners of the Feynman
Prize are Musgrave, for his theoretical work on a hydrogen
abstraction tool for nanotechnology, and Seeman for his
pioneering experimental work on the synthesis of 3-dimensional
objects from DNA.

Feynman Prize Winners:
James Gimzewski of the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory
accepted the Feynman Prize for Experimental Work from Ned
Seeman. Gimzewski's co-recipients, Reto Schlittler of IBM
and Christian Joachim of CEMES-CNRS, were not present.